Warsaw Ghetto

Warsaw Ghetto, 840-acre (340-hectare) area of Warsaw that consisted of the city’s old Jewish quarter. During the German occupation of Poland (1939–45), the Nazis enclosed it at first with barbed wire but later with a brick wall 10 feet (3 meters) high and 11 miles (18 km) long. The Nazis forced Jews from surrounding areas into this district until, by the summer of 1942, nearly half a million people had been confined within the ghetto. Many had no housing at all, and those who did were crowded in at about nine people per room. Starvation and disease (especially typhus) killed thousands each month.

On September 1, 1939, without a declaration of war, German troops marched into Poland from the north, the west, and the south. The Polish forces, weaker numerically and technically, were overcome by the German superiority of arms in spite of fierce resistance. During the Nazi siege of Warsaw in 1939, more than 10,000 citizens perished and more than 50,000 were wounded before the lack of supplies forced a surrender. The subsequent Nazi occupation was aimed at reducing Warsaw to a provincial city. Its cultural treasures were systematically plundered, and many of its inhabitants were carried away to German labor camps or to concentration camps. In all, some 600,000 to 800,000 residents of Warsaw are estimated to have died between 1939 and 1944.

Warsaw’s Jewish community was devastated. Prior to World War II, the city’s Jewish population was nearly 400,000. This was the largest urban concentration of Jews in Europe and the second largest in the world, after New York City’s. Jews were heavily represented in Warsaw’s bourgeoisie and intelligentsia, especially in the commercial classes and the professions. In addition to full religious and political freedom, Warsaw’s Jewry enjoyed its own press, its own Yiddish theater, and its own Jewish schools. Conflict with the rest of Warsaw society existed, but it was not alarming until immediately before the war.

Following German forces’ entry into Warsaw, a Jewish ghetto was established, surrounded by a high wall. Disease, starvation, and overcrowding caused thousands to perish before deportations to the Nazi death camps began. Some 312,000 Jews were sent to the gas chambers in 1942 alone. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April–May 1943 signaled a last, heroic act of defiance in the face of impending annihilation. The demolition by the Nazis of the Great Synagogue (now restored) symbolized the end of six centuries of Jewish Warsaw.